The mid-season draft for the Kings X Fantasy Football League looks like any meeting in any sports bar in America, until the moment an old man enters wearing a sport coat and tie and carrying a briefcase.

Suddenly there is a regal air to the Kings X draft. The old man is Andy Mousalimas, and he wears the coat of arms of the Toyota Hall of Fame: Legends of Fantasy Football on that jacket. He unsnaps the briefcase, shuffles some papers, and when he makes his pick, an Oakland tradition has made it through 50 consecutive seasons.

Mousalimas, who is 87, purports to have made the first draft choice in the first season of the first contest of what decades later came to be known as fantasy football, a numbers game that rewards a mind for statistical analysis and dexterity with the remote control. Under a variety of rules and bylaws, fantasy is played by millions of Americans - and millions of Americans have claimed they invented it.

"Everybody is trying to get credit for it," Mousalimas says as he dials up the combo lock on the case and carefully removes a piece of indisputable evidence. It is the draft card with the glorious names of 1963 scribbled in his hand - Unitas, Starr, Tittle, Gifford, McElhenny, Alworth, Tarkenton, Ditka- the list goes on, all the way to the Hall of Fame.

GOPPL's genesis

GOPPPL has long since become part of the Kings X league, which has 150 players broken into five divisions (Kings, Taxi, Rookies, X and Queens) of 10 teams each. The draft is held in the upstairs banquet room of the Grand Oaks Restaurant in Grand Lake. It costs $50 per team to select a roster of 18 NFL players - six receivers, four running backs, two quarterbacks, two kickers, three defensive specialists and one utility player.

"It's about not rooting for just the 49ers' whole team. It is taking players from other teams that you think are good and can score points for you," says Diane Schave of Piedmont, who is the Kings X commissioner and one of 40 women in the league.

The mid-season draft, a rarity among fantasy leagues, is a chance to drop your duds and injured players, and pick up replacements. Each division has a designated time to draft, in which they come upstairs with all the grave conviction of a voter entering the polls.

In half an hour the Mousalimas team - his grandson, Harry Ahlas, a Berkeley banker, and Carol Pennington, who has the lucky touch in pulling lottery numbers out of a hat - will go upstairs and make the picks that will rescue their team from seventh place among 10 in their division, called, naturally, the Kings.

There is strategizing to be done, but there is also the legend to discuss. That's why Mousalimas wears the jacket.

Seated in a booth, picking at a burger and fries, the first thing he will tell you is that he was not in the room when the game was invented.

At the beginning

He was tending bar at the Lamp Post at 23rd and Telegraph when his customer Scott Stirling, the Raiders beat reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was on a three-week road trip with the team. There was a lot of down time on that trip, and Stirling was passing it with Raiders PR man Bill Tunnell and Bill Winkenbach, a minority owner of the team.

"They were waiting to play the New York Titans (now the Jets) and they're sitting around the hotel and they thought up the game there," Mousalimas says.

That was during the 1962 season. By the time the draft rolled around in the summer of '63, Mousalimas had typed up a three-page rule sheet. The historic first draft was held in the rumpus room of Winkenbach's home on the Oakland-San Leandro border.

"The purpose of this league," it states, "is to bring together some of Oakland's finest Saturday morning gridiron forecasters to pit their respective brains (and cash) against each other."

An old injury

Having drawn the first pick, Mousalimas selected quarterback George Blanda of Houston, who went on to have his best year. But the player he passed over, Jim Brown of Cleveland, had everybody's best year.

"Don't remind me. I'm still living it down," Mousalimas says of his 50-year thorn. "We ended up in last place."

Headquarters for the league became the Lamp Post. Mousalimas used to close the bar at 2 a.m. on a Monday and drive straight to the Tribune to pick up the early edition. From there he'd hit De Lauer's Super Newsstand for the out-of-town papers. Then he'd be up until opening time calculating the stats. By lunch time, the scores would be up on the leader boards. "It's easy now," he says. "All you have to do is open the Internet."

In 1968, Mousalimas bought the Kings X on Piedmont Avenue.

He started his own league, the Kings X, which invited GOPPPL to join, in a merger that anticipated the AFL-NFL merger in 1969.

By 1974, there were four divisions and draft night at the Kings X was 200 experts strong, a rollicking event that added class by starting an all-women division called "the Queens."

"They used to call me Mr. 86," Mousalimas says. "I didn't allow anybody to fool around with the ladies there."

Mousalimas ended up selling the Kings X, in 1991, and retiring. The Kings X, also known for its monthly trivia tournaments, closed in 2005 and is now a tiki bar named the Kona Club. Fantasy football did not fit the theme, so the Kings X league moved on to the Grand Oaks, which is a sports bar, as measured by a count of screens, but lacking the brick and leather charm of the Kings X.

3 wins in 5 decades

In 50 years of GOPPPL and Kings X leagues, Mousalimas' team has won it three times, "which isn't much," he concedes. Of the original 16, he is the only one still participating, though too many years in stadiums and bars have diminished his hearing.

Before this season, Schave and Ann Cook, draft announcer, had a banner made to honor "the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Pronosticators League." "Pronosticators" is both the wrong word and spelled wrong, but Mousalimas doesn't mind. That banner is more recognition than he has gotten from the city where he was born and still lives.

Reaching again into his briefcase, he withdraws a letter that he sent to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and members of the City Council, in hopes of getting recognition for the league.

"As an eighty-seven year old native of Oakland," the letter begins, "I rarely bother politicians with trifle problems, but it's essential I relate an important story pertaining to the city of Oakland that has been overlooked."

The letter was sent on Sept. 16. On Dec. 6, Mousalimas will turn 88. He is still awaiting a response as he climbs the stairs to draft his players.

"We're dropping Redman of Pittsburgh," he says with all the authority of 50 years at this, "and picking up Spiller of Buffalo."